A collaborative theory of narrative story-telling was tested in two experiments that examined what listeners do and their effect on the narrator. In 63 unacquainted dyads (81 women and 45 men), a narrator told his or her own close-call story. The listeners made 2 different kinds of listener responses: Generic responses included nodding and vocalizations such as "mhm." Specific responses, such as wincing or exclaiming, were tightly connected to (and served to illustrate) what the narrator was saying at the moment. In experimental conditions that distracted listeners from the narrative content, listeners made fewer responses, especially specific ones, and the narrators also told their stories significantly less well, particularly at what should have been the dramatic ending. Thus, listeners were co-narrators both through their own specific responses, which helped illustrate the story, and in their apparent effect on the narrator's performance. The results demonstrate the importance of moment-by-moment collaboration in face-to-face dialogue.

Elementary motor mimicry (e.g., wincing when another is injured) has been a classic problem in social psychology, with previous theories treating it as the overt manifestation of some intrapersonal process such as vicarious emotion. In a two-part experiment, we tested the hypothesis that motor mimicry is instead an interpersonal event, a nonverbal communication intended to be seen by the other. The first part examined the effect of a receiver on the observer's motor mimicry: The victim of an apparently painful injury was either increasingly or decreasingly available for eye contact with the observing subject. Microanalysis showed that the pattern and timing of the observer's motor mimicry were significantly affected by the visual availability of the victim. In the second part, naive decoders viewed and rated the reactions of these observers. Their ratings confirmed that motor mimicry was consistently decoded as "knowing" and "caring" and that these interpretations were significantly related to the experimental condition under which the reactions were elicited. These results cannot be explained by any alternative, intrapersonal theory, so a parallel process model is proposed: The eliciting stimulus may set off both internal reactions and communicative responses, but these function independently, and it is the communicative situation that determines the visible behavior.The order of the authors' names was determined alphabetically. This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the University of Victoria.The authors wish to thank Brad Dishan for being an experimenter and assisting with pilot work; Lisa Bryson for scoring and discussions; and Dave Prette and Alanna Moore for scoring. The manuscript benefited greatly from the comments of David Rosenhan and the JPSP reviewers.

The authors examined precisely when and how listeners insert their responses into a speaker's narrative. A collaborative theory would predict a relationship between the speaker's acts and the listener's responses, and the authors proposed that speaker gaze coordinated this collaboration. The listener typically looks more at the speaker than the reverse, but at key points while speaking the speaker seeks a response by looking at the listener, creating a brief period of mutual gaze called here a gaze window. The listener was very likely to respond with "mhm," a nod, or other reaction during this period, after which the speaker quickly looked away and continued speaking. This model was tested with 9 dyads in which 1 person was telling a close-call story to the other. The results confirmed the model for each dyad, demonstrating both collaboration in dialogue at the microlevel and a high degree of integration and coordination of audible and visible acts, in this case, speech and gaze.While listening to someone tell a story, listeners regularly make brief appropriate responses (sometimes called "back channels," after Yngve, 1970). The goal of the research reported here was to understand the timing of these responses, that is, why listeners respond when they do. Is this a haphazard event, is it determined by characteristics of the listener, or is it related to actions of the speaker (and if so, how)? We have pursued these questions first through an inductive qualitative analysis, then by statistical tests of the hypotheses we had developed. The data were videotapes of unacquainted dyads in which one person told a close-call story to the other.

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